During an interview with Sky News host and NBC Contributor Wilfred Frost on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that the United States wants to have an American clean energy industry, but “not one that dominates global production,” just one that “satisfies a meaningful portion of our own demand and also generates good jobs for Americans.”
While speaking about recent tariffs President Joe Biden placed on China, Yellen said China is “now very focused on a huge investment in manufacturing, and particularly, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, clean energy, and the consequence of that is they’ve developed massive overcapacity in clean energy industries. Their capacity to produce solar panels is twice total global demand, and the same is true for critical minerals, electric vehicles, electric vehicle batteries. And we feel in the United States, we’ve passed the most important, historic legislation to address climate change. We intend to have a clean energy industry in the United States, not one that dominates global production, but one that satisfies a meaningful portion of our own demand and also generates good jobs for Americans. And we don’t wish to have that threatened by massive overcapacity in China that leads to dumping.”
Yellen also stated that the U.S. continues to work with China on climate, but the U.S. is overdependent on China for crucial supplies.
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